On 4 February 2026, it was
Map Day

Thank you to everyone who rallied in their own part of the world to make this first Map Day a success.

A page that will grow over the coming days retraces some of the highlights, press coverage, video replays and images of this first Map Day.

The first newsletter since Map Day is out. If you did not receive it, you will find it at this address.

And if you have not signed up yet, this way: https://www.republiquedescartes.fr/newsletter

Would you like to share your experience of Map Day on 4 February, whether you organised something or took part? We are holding two conversations, and you are very welcome at either:

• eventThursday 12 February 2026 - 5 to 6 pm (online)
• eventMonday 16 February 2026 - 12 to 1 pm (online)

On 29 and 30 October 2025, the La République des cartes team was in Strasbourg for the 8^th edition of Numérique en Commun[s], which brings together a wide range of people around a shared mission: building a digital world that serves the common good - open, inclusive, accessible, sustainable, sovereign and ethical.

It was a chance for Emmanuelle and Kola, of our team, to present La République des cartes and then to run the workshop “The maps we need” with some thirty participants.

We naturally took the opportunity to invite them all to take part in Map Day on 4 February!

The whole team thanks the NEC organisers for this event and its excellent programme. If you missed it, you can find some replay videos on YouTube and on this page of the NEC website.

Thanks too to our partners and to the members of the steering committee who were there with us.

On 3, 4 and 5 October, La République des cartes took part for the first time in the 36^th edition of the Festival International de Géographie (FIG) 2025, in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. Well known to geographers, the festival was created in 1990 and draws 40,000 visitors every year.

For us it was a chance to present the initiative as a whole and to run the workshop “The maps we need” (the kit for running it where you are is coming soon) with a varied, curious and willing audience.

The workshop is a way both to discuss and debate what maps mean and what they do, and to identify new maps we ought to have.

We ran it twice, for some thirty participants, in groups of five to eight for 45 minutes. That length feels right: long enough for a conversation to settle, short enough to keep the energy of the group.

Several good suggestions for improving the format came out of it, among them:

• widening the range of maps on offer (historic, hand-drawn, made by schoolchildren…);
• adapting the kit for 8- to 14-year-olds;
• devising "sets" of maps for different audiences (teachers, elected officials, the general public, and so on).
• …

Our thanks to the partners and steering committee members of La République des cartes who were there, and who enriched the discussions further.

On 24 September, Alexandre Tisserant, director of earth observation at IGN, presented La République des cartes at the Mêlée numérique, which brings together start-ups, large groups, institutions, researchers, students and enthusiasts in Toulouse every year to debate the great digital and social transformations. If you missed it, you can watch the replay below (at 1 h 32, eleven minutes long).

On 23 September, La République des cartes held its official launch at Léonard, the foresight and innovation platform of the VINCI group, with an evening devoted to an idea as simple as the one on our home page: rethinking the map as a democratic tool, so that everyone can take hold of it, see the world differently, argue about it and help decide the future of the places we live in.

On the programme, among other things:

• an immersive workshop, "The maps we need", where everyone chose a map and explored its history, its message and the imagination behind it;
• a presentation of the project, setting out its central ambitions: celebrating the diversity of uses, inventing new representations, strengthening our digital sovereignty and gathering a committed community;
• inspiring accounts of contemporary cartography, from the Anthropocene to geographical intelligence, by way of artistic and citizen uses.

The evening marks the beginning of a collective momentum that will start in earnest early next year with Map Day, on 4 February 2026 - an event open to every initiative, wherever it takes place.